Unit 5: Television and short film production

Our brief for unit 5 was to create a short film for our unit 15, in this we chose to create a short film. Our short film was named Arden Secret and follow the narrative of a group of friends with a relationship in the group- which the protagonist Arden was cheating on her boyfriend with his best friend, this led other things to happen to conclude to the ending of the mystery drama based film. Our target audience for Arden's secret was of a C2DE classification and a female audience of 60% and 40% male, which was 15-24 years old. Because of the young age our film is based at we made the film have a classification of a 15, this is because it has irrational behaviour and drugs which are shown in the short film- we got these of BBFC as it states which ratings are suitable for types of films. The genre of our short film is mystery drama as it has similar conventions of this genre of film, therefore it was easier to understand a basic narrative and storyline to use.

For our narrative we chose to base it around the the whole group as all main characters tied in to the story, as Arden and Evan being the couple and having problems throughout the story and keeping a secret from him. We thought it would be good to create a short film which was based on the mystery genre rather than having horror film as they don't tend to be scary as with a mystery drama we can show a wider meaning.

Based off the feedback we received our audience understood the narrative but they didn't give an explanation of what it was fully about- as people suggested an improvement to make the narrative more clear as they don't understand what the ending is meant to be about.
Our audience also understood from the film that it was based on a mystery and drama genre, this was understood as we used the conventions of a mystery film. We also show the films target audience through the use of the characters and props used, as the characters are all in their teen years and dressed appreciate for how they would at that age, the use of props like the alcohol and the location of a party also helps settle the target audience range as our audience know it will be targeted at the teens and young adults.
For our short film we used a lot of medium shots this was to not just get the expression on the characters face but have some of their outfit and location in the shot so the audience knew what was happening. Although we would have liked to use harder shots for example arc shots which are good to use in a tense moment so would have been perfect for our film being a mystery/ drama, if we was to do this film again we would ensure to use shots like that for example and dolly zooms.
Through the editing stage we used Adobe Premier this is because it is used in the professional industry and when exported can we viewed by anyone. We used tools In that software for example the fade in and out effect which was used commonly to make it run soothly to the next scene and added a location shot with atmospherically music in to set a new scene and break them up. This makes it more visually pleasing for the audience.

In conclusion, we faced some weaknesses in making Arden Secret for example one being that we did not plan our time as well as we could have leading us to have a lot of tasks to do at once and underestimating how long the video takes to edit to get it to match the audio. If we was to do this task again I would make sure to create more production plans and meeting minutes and following them throughout making the film.